The last two days I spent at the waterfront conference center in Stockholm, Sweden attending Jfokus2015, Sweden’s biggest developer conference with 1,700 participants. To make this even scarier, I gave the opening keynote one day after joining a new company and a technical talk about HTML5 at a conference mostly frequented by Java developers.

Jfokus is a big, seven track event. Many of the other talks covered frameworks, out-of-the-box solutions or big topics like smart homes, self-aware drones and other IOT matters. The organisation was very smooth and as it is the case with all Nordic events, the catering excellent.

The keynote: you don’t need another hero app, you need one that survives the Thunderdome

I was very humbled to hear that I’ve been chosen to give the opening keynote and I put a talk together that covers the current state of the app space and what developers can do to stay relevant in a world of declining install numbers and OS functionality takeovers.

HTML5 beyond the hype

My second talk was about the current state of HTML5. My goal for this talk was not to dazzle and impress with great new technology and experimental features. Instead, I wanted to remind people how much we have available to us across browsers these days. A lot of very basic, but also very useful functionality of HTML5 and CSS3 is now safe to use. The hype around HTML5 at his inception and the subsequent disappointment when browsers didn’t support it immediately made us forget about these features. In this talk, I wanted to remind people of what can be used and how it could improve existing web solutions – even in the enterprise space.

All in all, I very much enjoyed my time at Jfokus. The organisation is very efficient, it was fun to talk to people and good to see that me joining a big company didn’t change much the way people approached me. I hope I managed to inspire some people to play with tech they have not before and to tell their bosses about things their companies should be doing.